The needs of law enforcement sometime require access to communications originating from or received by a target, such as an individual suspected of engaging in criminal activity. The communications may take place in various forms, including regular and electronic mail, face-to-face conversations, and communications transmitted over telephone lines, such as telephone conversations and facsimile transmissions. When law enforcement officials are legally authorized to intercept and monitor such communications, for example when a court order authorizing a wiretap on a target's telephone line has been issued, it is important that the officials can gain access to such communications without putting the target on notice that he or she is under surveillance.
In the context of telephone communications, legacy telephone line surveillance devices require an analog access point for lawful intercept monitoring. The monitoring device is typically connected to an analog, or “Tip and Ring,” circuit. In the traditional Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) architecture, telephone service is generally provided by extending a pair of metallic wires, such as copper wires, from a central office to a subscriber's premises. Access points, such as connections provided by cross boxes and local terminals, are typically provided along the circuit between the central office and the subscriber's premises. These access points allow for a monitoring device to be installed in a strategic location along the analog circuit between the central office and a target's premises, such as a location close to the central office where the target would not be aware of the installation or the fact that the target is under surveillance.
Traditional POTS architecture, however, is increasingly being replaced by fiber optic networks, such as Fiber to the Premises (FTTP) architecture, which use fiber optic cable instead of metallic cable to connect a subscriber's premises to the central office and provide telephone service. In a FTTP system, telephonic communications may be digitized and bundled for transmission over the fiber optic cable. In this way, communications received by the central office for transmission to a subscriber, such as communications destined for the target, no longer have a dedicated circuit over which the signals are transmitted. Rather, the digital data bundles are dynamically assigned to communication pathways between the central office and the target's premises. Such dynamic assignment of pathways allows the telephone service provider to use the communications network more efficiently to transmit signals; however, the dynamic assignment also presents obstacles to lawful surveillance of a target's communications as intercepting the signals propagating via one circuit no longer correlates to intercepting only one subscriber's communications.
The replacement of traditional metallic cable with optical fibers has also eliminated the analog access points that are generally required for the installation of lawful intercept monitoring devices. Although the optical fiber extending to the subscriber's premises is generally terminated in an optical network terminal (ONT) at the subscriber location, where the communication pathway may transition to metallic cable once again, installation of the lawful intercept monitoring device at the target's ONT may be visible to the target and may thus alert the target that he or she is under surveillance, thereby defeating the purpose of the surveillance.
Therefore, there exists a need for systems and methods of lawfully intercepting and monitoring telephonic communications to and from a target receiving telephone service over a fiber optic network in a way that is transparent to the target and does not alert the target that he or she is under surveillance.